Journey through Dja Dja Wurrung Country.

180 Years (1836 – 2016) 30 Sept, 1 & 2 Oct 2016.

The final weekend of September, and early October 2016 marks exactly 180 years since Major T L Mitchell traversed Dja Dja Wurrung Country (1836), now known as Central Victoria. Artist and expeditioner Eliza Tree has organized a series of events over the weekend, to revisit the significance of his journey, and the impact of events to follow.

Major Mitchell named the ‘Australia Felix’, the abundant or happy Australia. His descriptions of land “resembling an English park” are what we now understand to be of Indigenous cultural landscapes, populated and actively cultivated for ongoing abundance by Dja Dja Wurrung Peoples, for many millennia

Eliza’s new paintings focus increasingly on pre-contact times, revealing abundant landscape and ecology, amidst a fascinating and varied geological region – ranging from volcanoes to granitic metamorphic aereols and outcrops, ancient ocean beds and extensive systems of waterways. Inspired and informed by primary source documents, and maps, and the works of Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage, the new paintings shine new light on the region and Indigenous ownership and occupation. Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Taungwurrung Country, Kulin Nation.

Eliza Tree’s ongoing research also reveals that the ‘Land rush’ of squatters and sheep which followed hot on Mitchells wheel tracks 1836 – 1851, caused dispossession and disaster for the Indigenous peoples, of unprecedented scale. The fifteen years preceding the Gold rush(s) wrought destruction upon Culture and landscape, with the introduction of hard hooves, firearms and lawless pastoral invasion, in what is now be understood to be the ‘Fastest land grab in history” James Boyce 1835.

This Event is not to celebrate, but to recognise Mitchell’s journey and the avalanche of events which were to follow.